February 2, 2011

C (pronounced "See") is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the UNIX operating system. The origin of C is closely tied to the development of the Unix operating system.

C is an imperative (procedural) systems implementation language. It was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support. C was therefore useful for many applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language.

Advantages

Here are some advantages of programming in C:

C is a general purpose programming language, meaning that it is not limited to any one specific kind of programming. This is different from languages like COBOL which was built for business applications, and FORTRAN for scientific calculations. You can write all sorts of software using C. .

C is not a very high-level language. A high-level language tries to isolate the programmer from the hardware as much as possible. In contrast, C allows you to directly access memory addresses, create bit fields and structures and map them to memory, perform bitwise operations and so on. C facilitates hardware programming. .

Not being high-level also means there is little overhead; it is highly efficient and provides fast execution speed. .

There are C language compilers and development tools available for many different platforms from small embedded systems to large mainframes and supercomputers. .

C has been around for almost 40 years. In that time there has much software written in C. If there is some functionality you need in a C program you are writing, chances are someone has already written it. It may even be available for free.

Many people say C is old language now.. but read this..Uses of C

In spite of its age, C is still being heavily used in industry. Several surveys have placed C as one of the most popular languages currently in use.

C is a very good choice for writing software to control hardware. The Unix (and derivatives) operating system's kernel is written in C (with some small pieces in assembly). Most firmware and device drivers are written in C as well.

C is also used in many real-time systems programming. While the language itself does not have any real-time features, it can be combined with platform-specific libraries or libraries that implement the POSIX real-time interfaces. C is a very efficient language that does not require many supporting libraries to run and does not have much overhead, which is desirable in low-memory embedded systems. Combining real-time libraries with C give it the timing constraints and other features needed for real-time programming.

Because C is efficient and fast it is sometimes used as the development language of other programming languages. Languages like PHP and Perl have been written in C. Many computationally intensive libraries and applications like MATLAB have been written in it too, for the same reason.

We have only talked about a few specialized domains where C is used. In addition to those, there are many other applications of all kinds that are written in C.